Saturday, 7 January 2017

"Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, was fatally shot by an off-duty Turkish police officer, Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, on the evening of 19 December 2016 at an art exhibition (kunstgalleriet Çağdaş Sanatlar Merkezi, red.) in Ankara, Turkey. The assassination took place after several days of protests in Turkey over Russian involvement in the Syrian Civil War and the battle over Aleppo."

"I've never seen anything like the photographs by Burhan Ozbilici* of the assassination of the Russian ambassador at an art gallery in Ankara, Turkey. A pathological act of bloodletting, terrorism, nationalism, a state of political siege. But in the stark white, pristine setting of an upscale art gallery showing contemporary art, with patrons, assassin, and victim all dressed in elegant black, the photographs themselves look strikingly surreal — uncanny, even — and, in some very painful ways, beautiful."